by admin | Aug 27, 2015 | Advisory
The ICAEW and British Business Bank have published a great free guide to business finance, covering debt finance, equity finance and ways to find support and advice. Here is the link while it’s still up: FREE guide to business finance It can be downloaded as a PDF from the site. Of course, don’t forget to ask Aiteo Consulting for...
by admin | Aug 14, 2015 | Uncategorised
SmallBizDaily is an American website which does what it says on the tin – it provides news on things which matter to small businesses. So visitors in September 2012, not least among them the site’s owner, were shocked to find that it was not showing small business news, but instead displayed extremist terrorist videos. The site had been hacked months before, and the evidence had only just appeared. Why would anyone do this? Taking the question a step further, why would anyone want to hack the website or servers of a small business? In this previous post, I described a slightly implausible scenario where disgruntled customers wanted revenge. Most disgruntled customers are unlikely to go this far. A competitor might also want access to your accounts or to send your website offline – but if you’re a small company, you’re unlikely to be attracting that sort of attention. There’s another threat out there though, as SmallBizDaily discovered: cybercriminals. You might assume that cybercriminals would only be interested in the big firms, but you’d be wrong. Symantec found that between 2010-2012, 40% of all targeted attacks were aimed at small or medium businesses. It actually makes a lot of sense for hackers to target these. Firstly, your business is more valuable to hackers than you imagine. Even if there’s not much money that they could transfer (supposing they were to have located enough banking information to access a company account), they could modify your website to display spam or other unwanted things. This could get you delisted from Google and other search engines, with horrific implications for future sales. Your...
by admin | Aug 7, 2015 | Uncategorised
We know that our data can be vulnerable wherever it’s stored, but the News of the World hacking scandal showed that mobile represents a particularly problematic environment. Investigators breaking into Milly Dowler’s phone shocked the nation, but also revealed once again how insecure our personal data can be. So what can we do about it? There always seems to be some hack in the news these days – but it’s good to keep in mind that most modern mobiles are secure. Smartphones are essentially computers with the ability to use mobile networks, and like other computers the information they hold can be protected with encryption. The problem is that, by default, much of it isn’t. For example, it emerged in 2014 that the NSA and GCHQ could intercept data sent from apps such as Angry Birds, potentially revealing information about players’ age, sex and their device’s unique identifier. This doesn’t sound like a big deal – and for most people it’s not – but it shows how your personal information is at risk in a bewildering number of ways. Realistically, there’s very little you can do to stop agencies such as the NSA or GCHQ surreptitiously accessing your information. Against less sophisticated hackers, however, it’s a different story. Here, encryption can work very well – the trick is making sure your apps, especially those you use to send secure communications, actually use it. This is especially important with services such as online banking or accountancy solutions such as Receipt Bank. The Receipt Bank app lets you photograph your receipts and then automatically uploads them to its servers and extracts...
